Activity

[...] All extremely uplifting—and just as unfocused: because the function of gerunds consists in leaving an action’s completion undefined, thus depriving it of any definite contour. An infinitely expanding present emerges, where policies are always in progress, but also only in progress. Many promi…

[...] Nominalizations remained unusually frequent because they ‘worked’ in so many interconnected ways: they hid the subject of decisions, eliminated alternatives, endowed the chosen policy with a halo of high principle and prompt realization. Their abstraction was the perfect echo of a capital tha…

[...] you don’t support countries which are cooperating with each other; you support ‘South–South cooperation’. An abstraction, where temporality is abolished. ‘The provision of social services and country assessments and action plans which assist in the formulation of poverty reduction p…

Issues, players, concern, efforts, platforms, dialogue, ground . . . ‘The whole tendency of modern prose is away from concreteness’, wrote Orwell in ‘Politics and the English Language’, and his words are as true today as they were in 1946. The Bank stresses the importance of what it’s saying—_key…

Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement brought together disparate themes in an original way: it combined Occupy Wall Street’s critique of economic hegemony with a form of legal-constitutionalist resistance against an authoritarian state; a call for democracy with an aspiration to a post-modern, post-nationa…